A few weeks ago, a friend of mine texted me:
"Mir, would you like to shot a male musician? He's having a gig this weekend. He contacted me. It's gonna be an interesting experience"
And of course I said yes to that offer. I always wanted to learn portrait photography, but I am just too tired with all the events and workshops of portrait photography in Jakarta that mostly use sexy/pretty/cute female model (menurut ngana fotografer cowo doang apa?). I am not joking when I said photography world, at least the one that I know here in Jakarta, is a pretty masculine world. So when I heard the offer of taking shots of a male human being, I grab that chance directly.
My and some of my friends met with Sergey aka Make Like a Tree in a cafe in South Jakarta on one fine Saturday morning. Sergey is a troubadour, a vagabond, he roamed around the globe with his instruments and performs from cafe to cafe, art-house to art-house, and along the way, he created his life stories and make friends. Me and my friends were fascinated to hear his stories on how he was late to ridethe Pelni boat from Sulawesi to Papua, and how he ended up meeting the president of Indonesia because of that :D
So the shooting day started in the pedestrian crossing bridge in Jakarta main road. We were pretty lucky that the lighting and the weather were pretty agreeable (or, to be exact, hot and humid). Here are some shots from that area.
This is a disclaimer, I love taking shots of people, but I do not really have strong knowledge on how to. I myself pretty surprise to see how different lighting creates different effect on his feature. I also had some difficulty on how to not create glares in the glasses cause it is pretty annoying for me. Well, more things to learn!
Next, we moved a bit to an area with lots of trees. Sergey was very easy to work with, he didn't mind if we asked him to pose in weird places :D
Here, I was surprised to see how capable my lens is. As you may already know (and pretty bored to hear), I use XF56mm F1.2 for street photography, which for me, works very well. But on this portrait session, I was mesmerised with how good that lens is for portrait photography (well, that's why the lens was made Mir, for PORTRAIT).
After we had enough exploring the area (and had enough of the mosquitos who kept on biting me -____-), we moved again to the other part of the area. Here we played with the architecture, the structure, and I, who adore minimalism, felt like home.
To be honest, I really enjoy this kind of portrait, when you play around with slow speed, not showing the whole face or body, and just having fun with the object and the place.
In sum, I really enjoyed the session and the learning and exploring process that I experienced during the whole morning. I definitely would like to shoot more portrait!
And here's a shot of the team that day XD
teawithmiranti
Shots were taken with Fujifilm X-T10 with Fujinon XF56mm F1.2, edited on Snapseed.